This is an experiment. Quickly, in tsunami like fashion, riffing with the junk of the day, picked up from mainstream madness newspaper news, and from the feeds on NPR, National Pediatric News. Other polluted pipelines from the crapper, like HuffPost, all the junk on line, etc. etc.

Alas, the experiment failed. My goal was to get the detritus out of my head, quickly, stream of consciousness-style, any way, cathartic, with some fugue of heavy rumbling. Some process to eviscerate the pain of so much wrong news, wrong reporting, wrong people getting their 15 minutes or 15 months of fame. JFK all month long …. And then there was Iran, Afghanistan, ACA, the News only Fit for Google.

365 Days of Sorrow

Too much bombards the head, the daily load of being human in a consumer-frantic world of Black Friday updates, Wall Street about to hit 17 thousand orgasms, and how to re-bake the GMO rotgut turkey. Even the so-called progressive KBOO Portland community radio has hosts going on and on about the oh-so incredible Hanukkah and Thanksgiving falling on the same day. These are African-American hosts, Monday, singing the praises of Thanksgiving a la Rockwell-K-Mart and then the Jewish holiday. Not a peep about the Original People’s decimation. Church-going, Church-praising hosts, and nothing about Indians. That for me is a big NO to the “thanks” in the giving of thanks, that is, for many, even a whitie like me — it’s a NATIONAL day of Mourning/SORROW. Nothing “giving” about that. For Christ’s sake:

Since 1970, American Indians have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US thanksgiving holiday.

Many American Indians do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. To some American Indians, Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture.

Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression that Native Americans continue to experience.

This year’s National Day of Mourning will be dedicated to Leonard Peltier. United American Indians of New England is a Native-led organization of Native people and others, who fight against racism. The organization’s website reads in part:

“We fight back on such issues as the racism of the Pilgrim mythology perpetuated in Plymouth and the US government’s assault on poor people. We protest the use of racist team names and mascots in sports. We speak to classes in schools and universities about current issues in the Native struggle. Indigenous people from North, Central or South America who live in New England and who agree with what we are trying to do are welcome to join with us. We also welcome the support of non-Native people from the four directions.”

Check it out, not what CNBC, NPR, CBS or the other faux joints will have on for the stuffing news Native News Network.

“Thanksgiving”- a National Day of Mourning an editorial by Publisher/Editor – Terri J Andrews

Never before in the history of America has a subset of this country’s population been so misrepresented, lied about, and viciously condemned and criticized than the Native American Indians. Our own history books present a censored and false past that glorifies the “proud, pure and righteous” settlers, while stereotyping the original inhabitants as wild savages in war bonnets, running through the forest looking for food and scalping innocent children and women.

Take a look through a child’s history book and you will often note an image of the pilgrims, colonists and pioneers that include log cabins, the pursuit of religious freedom and a strong sense of community. Now look for references to the Native peoples – words such as “primitive”, “massacre”, “Earth Gods” and “religious rituals” fill those same pages. Often times, paintings of the Native Indians hiding behind trees with tomahawks, watching the unsuspecting Europeans, are wrongly depicted to children.

This is a common thread woven through the fabric of American history – a lie that ties together a past built on stolen tradition and absent information retold in books authored by non-Native Americans.

The Thanksgiving holiday is a perfect example of censorship and the rewriting of truth. A portrait painted of the friendly Indians and the openhearted pilgrims coming together to feast after a long, sorry winter is accepted and tolerated by the American community. But this portrait is not correct. The story is much deeper than that; so much deeper that the Native American Indian community calls this day – The National Day of Mourning – and stages rallies to protest the holiday. Their reasons are valid. The true story of Thanksgiving is not something a country should be proud of.

Fact:
1. Yes, the “Pilgrims” did come to America in 1620.
2. Yes, they were inept to care for themselves due to the harshness of the winter and their lack of stored food and supplies.
3. Yes, they did have a “feast”.

Myth:
1. They were NOT met by “friendly” Indians who waved them in from the banks or welcomed their arrival. The Native people did not trust the whites, having encountered such foreigners before and suffering severe consequences. The Natives took pity on the settlers and only a (very) few Native Americans were actually “friendly” to the newcomers.
2. The Native community did not help the colonists because of a deep friendship, rather it was a custom of their culture and religion to help those who were in need.
3. The two groups did NOT come together to celebrate the harvest, as friends, and rejoice in the “first” Thanksgiving. They were meeting to discuss land rights.
4. Lastly, it was NOT the first Thanksgiving. An Autumnal harvest and banquet were a tradition of the Native people – a celebration that was a part of their culture for centuries.

Please note my years in El Paso del Norte, El Paso, Tejas. I talked with many in the arts-politics-revolutionary-people community. Hell, the city fathers and mothers of invention in El Paso have fought for years for the First Thanksgiving award, some 80 years before the Puritans came to barbarianize the Turtle Island. They have been wrestling over this Don Onate character, the Horseman, Conquistador, being the first celebrant from afar breaking bread, or Turkey, along the Rio Grande. With compliant natives. Here, read about it, but remember, historians think these Conquistadors are pilgrims, too, not genocidal whack jobs.

Again, my old stomping ground, and I was ensconced in journalism, the arts, protest and La Raza. I knew the artist who got the gig to build a statue of this genocidal guy, Don Onate. Thank god that statue’s feet have been lopped off.

“Size is an aesthetic quality to me,” John Houser said during an interview. “When you see a monument like Mount Rushmore, the first thing that comes to your mind is a sense of wonder. It’s awe-inspiring, like the history I am trying to portray.”

But there are always two sides to history. Indian people throughout Texas and New Mexico revile Oñate for an incident in 1599 when, according to most scholars, he terrorized the rebellious Acoma tribe by cutting off the right feet of dozens of young warriors. Though evidence of the account is sketchy, historians generally accept that Oñate ordered the brutal punishment and that his orders were probably carried out. In the wake of growing protests over the Oñate monument, at least two El Paso City Council members have rescinded their support for the project, though one has said he may reconsider.

Historians like Oscar Martinez at the University of Arizona argue that erecting a statue to Oñate — particularly the largest statue of its kind — is a lot like flying the Confederate flag over the South Carolina state capital.

“The Pueblo people have never gotten over the cruel treatment and oppression they endured under Oñate,” Mr. Martinez wrote in a letter to the El Paso City Council. “Oñate’s behavior can actually be compared to Nazi officers who directed campaigns against the Jews in the 1930’s and 1940’s, including extermination drives.

“Who would ever consider building a statue to some Nazi personage and placing it the town square?”

Comet’s Coming, and Hanukkah and Turkeys

So, we are infected by this crap of the Christian and white Zionist cultural lie, the “big deals and sales and rock bottom buys” modern, neo-Zionist Jews and Christians believe is the reality of their bizarre holiday, the god that was not there. Read this odd but reality-based rationale from a Jew who laments being Jewish during the commercial season of lights, butter-balls, and immaculate conception.

Usually Hanukkah is a neighbor of Christmas, a tough season for those who spent their childhoods juggling the Jewish and American sides of their psyche. It isn’t easy being non-Christian on the countdown to Dec. 25.

As a kid, I’d look out our front window and see other families carrying a Christmas tree home. Recognizing the hangdog look on our faces, my mother would console me and my brother with a cheery reminder: “But you have Hanukkah.”

The only problem was, we wanted Christmas. It had nothing to do with theology. My image of Christmas didn’t stem from Nativity scenes in front of nearby churches. To me, it was symbolized by a Lionel electric train chugging around a fir tree festooned with tinsel, marking not so much a religious holiday as a patriotic one.

Those who celebrated it were patently Americans. What we were was an open question. My mother’s answer was the subtext of her Hanukkah message. It was her way of saying that you didn’t have to be Christian to be a true, blue American. It was a vision she’d inherited from her immigrant parents, who’d left czarist Russia , where those who celebrated Hanukkah instead of Christmas weren’t considered real Russians.

To me, it seemed more like an either/or situation. My envy of kids who hung stockings for St. Nick to fill was counterbalanced by guilt instilled at cheder, a one-room Hebrew school in a storefront synagogue. We were taught Judaism’s prayers by the rote-learning method, much as our ancestors were for centuries in Eastern Europe. Rarely did the teacher translate a biblical passage, let alone explain why we were reciting it.

Yet precisely because it had an Old World atmosphere, cheder bred a certain cultural loyalty. For me, it took the form of annually vexing over singing Christmas carols at our public school’s holiday program. Had you been passing through Albany Park in those years, you might have seen my lips truculently sealed during “Silent Night.”

In fact, bringing Hanukkah and Christmas together in a combined celebration is a mind-boggling assignment. Their stories are incompatible. Christmas commemorates the birth of the Messiah, according to Christian belief. Jews believe the Messiah has yet to come.

Yet Hanukkah and Thanksgiving share a common theme of a quest for religious freedom. It would be tempting to think they were made for each other, except for this year’s once-in-a-lifetime concurrence — which derives from something that’s bedeviled calendar makers ever since humans first wondered: “What day of the year is this?”

The problem is that the time it takes for the Earth to go around the sun — one year — isn’t an exact multiple of the time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its axis — one day. So the Gregorian calendar makes up the difference by adding a day in leap years, while the Hebrew calendar periodically adds a whole month. Because those fudge factors differ, Jewish holidays move up and down the Gregorian calendar in a dance analogous to the back and forth movements of the planets across the starry sky.

The movie that has been astounding audiences in theaters around the world is now available on a high-quality, feature-packed DVD. Own the taboo-shattering documentary that Newsweek says “irreverently lays out the case that Jesus Christ never existed.”

In this critically acclaimed film, you will discover:

The early founders of Christianity seem wholly unaware of the idea of a human Jesus

The Jesus of the Gospels bears a striking resemblance to other ancient heroes and the figureheads of pagan savior cults

Contemporary Christians are largely ignorant of the origins of their religion

Fundamentalism is as strong today as it ever has been, with an alarming 44% of Americans believing that Jesus will return to earth in their lifetimes

From exposing the hidden history of Christianity to lampooning the bloody excesses of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (which caused Gibson to attempt legal action against the documentary), The God Who Wasn’t There pulls no punches. Directed by award-winning filmmaker (and former Christian) Brian Flemming, The God Who Wasn’t There includes stimulating interviews with:

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation

Robert M. Price, Jesus Seminar fellow and author of The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man

Alan Dundes, Professor of Folklore at the University of California at Berkeley

Richard Carrier, historian and author of Sense and Goodness Without God

Okay, now back to the news, though I am listening to Reverend Billy Thornton on Amy Goodman, and the JP Morgan Chase Bank protest, a fun thing, and his one year in jail charge. For fun, silly, performance stuff, and this society just accepts this shit, the charges, the banks and pigs that bank there – like SEIU who banks at BoA, and all those financiers putting teacher’s retirement funds into the worst of the worst scum, the kind of businesses and corporations in the active pursuit of KILLING teachers.

For more than a decade, Reverend Billy, along with his Church of Stop Shopping, has preached fiery sermons against recreational consumerism — and more recently, against climate disaster. You can often find them greeting the crush of shoppers at Macy’s in New York City on Black Friday. That may not be the case this year. That is because in September, Rev. Billy was arrested after staging a 15-minute musical protest at a JP Morgan Chase Bank in Manhattan to highlight the bank’s environmental record and the extinction of a Central American golden toad. He now faces a year in prison for misdemeanor charges of riot in the second degree, menacing in the third degree, unlawful assembly and two counts of disorderly conduct. Despite this, he and The Stop Shopping Choir are performing in New York City every Sunday through December 22. Rev. Billy is also featured in the film “What Would Jesus Buy?” and in the book of the same name.

Also on her Monday show, with an extra interview posted, this great little Obama thing – the pigs in paradise Jewish and syphilitic Christian class of profiteers.

A new report details how corporations are increasingly spying on nonprofit groups they regard as potential threats. The corporate watchdog organization Essential Information found a diverse groups of nonprofits have been targeted with espionage, including environmental, antiwar, public interest, consumer safety, pesticide reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups. The corporations carrying out the spying include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, and others. According to the report, these corporations employ former CIA, National Security Agency and FBI agents to engage in private surveillance work, which is often illegal in nature but rarely — if ever — prosecuted. We’re joined by Gary Ruskin, author of the report, “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations,” and director of the Center for Corporate Policy, a project of Essential Information.

WTF and LOL, Selfie Culture USA

Okay, okay, back to the news of Monday:

Selfie what? So, that’s the new word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Best word of 2013. Bring in the new ones, like “droning,” or a new Shakespearean phrase . . . “to sequester or not to sequester.” Anyone go to the Urban Dictionary? Cute – irrelevant, and, well, sort of like that story on the dude who made up facts about Canada on-line. A Yes Men wannabe. Another riveting story blasted by white-man/woman NPR.

Here’s what some of my students are looking at and saying, a la Urban Dictionary.

managerial we

When a manager says “we” and means “you”
Bossman: We need to fix this
Wageslave: OK, should I set up a meeting for us?
Bossman: No, just do it. That was the “managerial we”; I meant “you”

go duck yourself

When you try to type “Go fuck yourself”, but you auto correct turned it to that. Also can happen if you have large thumbs, and you type “go fuck yourself”
“Fuck you”
“Go duck yourself”

Misophonia

The disorder in which a person experiences excessive anger towards those who smack their food or breathe too heavily.
Rachel: “Dude, what’s wrong with Tori?”
Truett: “Oh nothing, Sarah is eating and Tori is having some misophonia trouble.”

carpe noctem

Sieze the night. The oposite of carpe diem. Get work done durring the night and sleep all day!
Coders who are lazy during the day and code ’til 5 in the morning! Drink Bawls, stay awake!

Finding the Real You a la Deoxyribonucleic acid

Whew, what wasted lives we have. How about this other story: Twenty-three and Me, some DNA spit web site, that gets you to spit on the specimen delivery stick, and, wow, the company then tests you and gives you everything you need to know about, err, your lifestyle. Got cancer in your DNA history? Then, lop off the breasts or testicles. You can’t make this stuff up, really. Oh yeah, another Zionist-Evangelical crap Google thing:

The Food and Drug Administration has sent a warning letter to the company 23andMe demanding that its saliva test be taken off the market. The company claims the test can detect the genetic likelihood of more than a hundred diseases — a claim the FDA says the company has not proved sufficiently.

Methane is the source of the gas we burn in stoves. You can also use it to make plastics, anti-freeze or fertilizer. It comes out of underground deposits, but it also seeps up from swamps, landfills, even the stomachs of cows.

And while methane is valuable, a lot of it gets up into the atmosphere, where it becomes a very damaging greenhouse gas.
Scientists have been trying to find out, with varying success, exactly how much of this climate-warming gas gets into the atmosphere. A study published in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests there’s much more up there than previously thought.

It’s a Breaking Bad world of stupidity, as some couple does the wedding a la methamphetamine. You know, the theme of that insipid show, with all the accouterments including the wedding rings on breaking bad blue meth rocks.

US Culture and Western Civilization, Very Funny Fantasies — Getta Outta My Face-ehh, You wanna Job!@#$%?!

Civilization is dead. As all those IP trackers are on every single thing we do on this stinking computer. Black boxes in cars. GPS tracking phones. Every blip of information collected by government-company bossman. Can you imagine, the realities of the job market now, for me, since I have been on it since, oh, Jan. 2013. Then doing my patriotic thing: I got off the unemployment INSURANCE, in May, to take a shit-can job, so YOU and your favorite corporation can live high off the hog. How many companies – many non-profits, public sector places – have I applied to? How many just never even acknowledge the search and query and the downloaded materials and applications and odd questions answered? How many come back and say, “Sorry we have been so remiss in timely responses, but with incredible interest in our shit-company, we’ve had 400, 600 and now, 1,000 people apply for this position.”

Well, I am clearly not “in”, clearly seen as Neo-Luddite: no Facebook, no Instagram, no continuous love of Linked-In. These companies, pray tell, are most probably trolling the internet, looking at my articles, from all over the place. These so-called social justice outfits are tied to iPad-iSurveillance, and I can imagine the reverse of the report above — Gary Ruskin’s report, “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations.”

I’m not feeling the love of the nonprofit world, so middling, so silo-shaped, so pathetically ageist and mean-spirited and almost FAS-like in their deadening disregard for people, us, out there. In fact, I believe their continuous posting of this or that job is cruel, and in fact, the inside track, those who have interned and given up years of volunteering, or just inside folk on the payroll, I just have a stinking suspicion that the entire thing – posting of jobs – is tied to their bullshit non-profit status and smoke and mirrors.

Goodwill Pays 22 Cents an Hour — Let’s Apply Now with those College Degrees

So, I apply to Goodwill Industries as an educator, communication specialist, development specialist, counselor, any number of jobs I am qualified for, and what is that nonprofit CEO making? Say, oh, $750,000 a year, and they pay, 22 cents an hour. Talk about NON-profit bullshit little Eichmanns. Where do they go to school? What school of social justice do they call Alma mater?

One of the nation’s best-known charities is paying disabled workers as little as 22 cents an hour, thanks to a 75-year-old legal loophole that critics say needs to be closed.

Goodwill Industries, a multibillion-dollar company whose executives make six-figure salaries, is among the nonprofit groups permitted to pay thousands of disabled workers far less than minimum wage because of a federal law known as Section 14 (c). Labor Department records show that some Goodwill workers in Pennsylvania earned wages as low as 22, 38 and 41 cents per hour in 2009.

“If they really do pay the CEO of Goodwill three-quarters of a million dollars, they certainly can pay me more than they’re paying,” said Harold Leigland, who is legally blind and hangs clothes at a Goodwill in Great Falls, Montana for less than minimum wage.

“It’s a question of civil rights,” added his wife, Sheila, blind from birth, who quit her job at the same Goodwill store when her already low wage was cut further. “I feel like a second-class citizen. And I hate it.”

When a non-profit provides Section 14 (c) workers to an outside business, it sets the salary and pays the wages. For example, the Helen Keller National Center, a New York school for the blind and deaf, has a special wage certificate and has placed students in a Westbury, N.Y., Applebee’s franchise. The employees’ pay ranged from $3.97 per hour to $5.96 per hour in 2010. The franchise told NBC News it has also hired workers at minimum wage from Helen Keller. A spokesperson for Applebee’s declined to comment on Section 14 (c).

Helen Keller also placed several students at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Manhasset, N.Y., in 2010, where they earned $3.80 and $4.85 an hour. A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman defended the Section 14 (c) program as providing jobs to “people who would otherwise not have [the opportunity to work].”

Harold said he believes Goodwill can afford to pay him minimum wage, based on the salaries paid to Goodwill executives. While according to the company’s own figures about 4,000 of the 30,000 disabled workers Goodwill employs at 69 franchises are currently paid below minimum wage, salaries for the CEOs of those franchises that hold special minimum wage certificates totaled almost $20 million in 2011.

In 2011 the CEO of Goodwill Industries of Southern California took home $1.1 million in salary and deferred compensation. His counterpart in Portland, Oregon, made more than $500,000. Salaries for CEOs of the roughly 150 Goodwill franchises across America total more than $30 million.

Goodwill International CEO Jim Gibbons, who was awarded $729,000 in salary and deferred compensation in 2011, defended the executive pay.

Resist by Spitting in All of Their Faces

So, I say, SCREW this country, this society, this culture. You get the picture yet?

Very hard-nosed and personal, this piece. Great writing as always. We slip-stream through the read, find light in the literary labyrinth and then come out the other end recalling the old days, good and some bad, and now, and I see the style you deploy and the movement of time and space in the narrative you employ, well, it’s all very empowering, from a reader’s point of view, to see how you believe those words, those feelings, those nostalgic and the real realities of cops gone bad, Gangs of New York, anytime USA, where the cops have ALWAYS been the bad guys, with a pretty good minority of them trying to be human and humane.

I’ve been a police reporter since my college days. Was with a County Sheriff in Cochise County when the first drug tunnel was found. Hit the hot organ pipe cactus land when 13 Salvadorans were found dead. Whiskey-drinking Mormon sheriff, showing the young pug the ropes.

I ended up in Mexico, Guatemala, Texas, AZ and New Mexico. Cops are bad. Just part of the DNA. I’ve been thrown down in El Paso, handcuffed in Arizona, and had my face sprayed with pepper juice in Seattle. I’ve been that cop reporter all over the place, and I’ve been a revolutionary too, undercover, working for the false balance, faux newspaper, the So Called Liberal (not) Media. Cops gone bad, well, it’s more likely, where are the good cops . . . not, Where Have All the Good Cops Gone?

There were a few enlightened ones, like Stamper who screwed up as police chief in Seattle when WTO righteous ones were beaten . . . he’s retreated into a pro-pot/pro-drugs world.

Look, 70 percent of every tax dollar is being spent on so called Criminal Justice. That’s in towns like Spokane where I also report the news. A piece coming out in two weeks at the Spokane Living Magazine by yours truly is on Smart Justice. The sheriff in Spokane, well, he wants a new jail, at $260 million. However, a panel and community force won the day for now — Smart Justice. Read about it, soon, here, Dec. 15.

People in jail because they owe debts. People thrown in jail because of the color of their skin. Youth of color pushed into the school to prison to grave pipeline. Jails as mental health units. Has anyone looked at FAS — fetal alcohol syndrome or effects, well, try 60 percent of all people in jail with FAS/FASD?You think cops and copland can deal with that? Cops and wannabe cops were some of my worse students as a college teacher. Really. Border Patrol scum, DEA thugs, and the federalies that don’t need no stinking badge.
I don’t need no stinking humanity.

So, as a writer on all sides of the magical realism world, I understand the beauty of cop stories and the narrative twists and sick mirror into the carnival and freak show of society. We have a sick need to see poor people hurting. Lots of realities, and the border of our minds, whether the border in the USA with Mexico or our own bored and distracted borders of our pathetic consumer minds, well, that’s the hard reality of crime, too — people want to rebel against the shame of this kettle society: taxes for the poor, eminent domain of the mind, death of arts and education, and a police brutality that is Call of Duty ready for the next and the next freaky group of people loving Breaking Wind, err, Breaking Bad. We are not a better society or culture because of cops.

Chuck’s take is Rockwellian and Orwellian. Thanks for the great writing, bro’. I still recall that 80 year old lady, at Occupy Seattle, pepper sprayed by the bicycle-driving cops of Blue City Seattle. Punks who indeed need the holy you know what beaten from them.

Speaking of selfies, the bloody mainstream white middle class and eastern educated and pretty much Jewish news of NPR, well, we get a story on why Mexican drug kingpins, muchachos, ladrones. punks, rapists who are only drug dealing heroes in the minds of the dead, why would they do selfies of themselves with guns, drugs, macho stares? Really? That’s news, a la white burden girl and boy of the middling kind?

Spitzer, Weiner, x, y and z idiot in Hollywood like Michael Douglas saying oral sex got him the throat cancer. Selfies, tweets, and just decades of voyeurism and exhibitionism and talent-less lines going for a really big price. Sort of like the fake value of Teletubbies dolls still packaged in their original cardboard.

That’s story numero uno for the insipid and tragically oh-metro-sexual-asexual-middle-IQ-hip-a-la-urbane-DC-urban?

Just replace this punk narco-scum’s photo with one of a fave US Senator, or Rand Paul’s speech writer’s chubby face, or Al Gore ‘s [with his massage problem in cloudy Portland, Oregon (look it up, I dare you)]. Weiner, Tom “DNA from Meteorite” Cruise, all of them, just replace the selfie above with their ugly mugs, or the one of the high school principal out here being sued in Portland for facilitating sexual harassment – sextortion? New dictionary term, like sexting? SEXTORTION?

In a lawsuit filed in May in Columbia County, Harrison claims her ex-boyfriend pressured her into giving him a naked photo of herself and threatened to share it unless she sent more.

His friends, too, bullied and harassed her, according to the lawsuit, with one boy even charged with attempted rape at one point. The teen later admitted to lesser charges and is now on probation.

The $2.5 million lawsuit, which alleges battery, assault, parental liability and other claims against five students and their families, is making waves in the logging town of 1,800 that prides itself on its “small-town values” and Norman Rockwell appeal.

Not only are the families well known in Clatskanie — one has a relative who is a city official and another owns a local business — but Harrison’s lawyer contends that the girl’s photo is just one of hundreds collected by boys at the school who have similarly pressured their female classmates.

OR . . . .

A lawsuit has been filed against Sherwood School District and former teacher Denise Keesee, arrested last Monday on charges of sexual abuse against two students.

The suit, seeking $5.1 million, filed in Washington County Circuit Court late last week says Keesee developed a sexual relationship with the plaintiff, when he was a sophomore in her special education class at Sherwood High School.

Keesee developed a close personal relationship with the teen and gained his “friendship, admiration and obedience,” according to the complaint. The physical aspect of their relationship, the complaint says, began when Keesee touched the student’s thigh in class, later kissed him and eventually had sex with him. These incidents allegedly occurred both at school and off-campus.

Israel Dispatches Plutonium Agents to Get POTUSA

Okay, moving along this syphilitic highway to nowhere, what about Israel dispatching Bibi to the US to go after that spineless Obama. Yeah, it’s Iran, the sanctions, the great balls of ball fire of the tough guys in suits and Viagra and jiggers of bourbon.

Swiss Army Arms Nation

What’s this, Switzerland (sells guns, is a money laundering joint, and some of the most pathetic people I have run into traveling have been Swiss – all about money, finances, and, well, you have to be with a Swiss boy and girl in Mexico or Central America. The question is, “Why are you here since you despise and criticize everything about this country, the people, the culture, the food?”). Well, they voted down the referendum for making sure the CEO or bossman makes no more than 12 times the amount of income than the average worker. Went down 65 to 35, back to business as usual – what, 1,000 times the income for that CEO, bossman?

An Ohio grand jury has indicted the superintendent of Steubenville City Schools, the assistant football coach of Steubenville High School and two other school employees for their behavior in the aftermath of the rape of a 16-year-old in August 2012 by two football players.

On March 17, a judge convicted 16-year-old Ma’lik Richmond and 17-year-old Trent Mays of raping a 16-year-old girl while she was intoxicated. Mays was also convicted of distributing photographs of the victim while she was naked.

The thing, though, listening to Corporate Central NPR on Tuesday, the prosecutor – AG of Ohio — said not ONE THING about the suffering the victim went through. He went on and on how communities and the state has suffered enough. One Sick-guy, but sicker yet, the white-class NPR allowing that to stand without getting on some real human to make a comment about THAT huge sexist-misogynist diatribe.

Well, who knows what the news brings — Governor of Oregon has some GMO study group up and running. The shifting baseline will kill us all. Oregon grows GMO sugar beets, so if it’s here already — untested FrankenCrops — why not rye, wheat, corn, anything GMO, because the default now is, well, if it’s okay for that one crop, then all crops are okay. The Oregoniangives us that little bit.

Will It Be Not In Our Name that Wins the Day in North America, CanaUSA?

Finally, in honor of National Day of Mourning, we here about coal trains, a new coal port near Bellingham, and the Lummi Nation. You know, build the port to take the coal to China, and, shoot, no big deal since Lummi life is tied to the living villages (we call archaeological sites) which to White Judeo-Christian soldiers of industry, tech, profits, well, No Big Deal since we can BUY off anyone!

Three summers ago the company that wants to build the largest coal export terminal in North America failed to obtain the environmental permits it needed before bulldozing more than four miles of roads and clearing more than nine acres of land, including some wetlands.

Pacific International Terminals also failed to meet a requirement to consult first with local Native American tribes, the Lummi and Nooksack tribes, about the potential archaeological impacts of the work. Sidestepping tribal consultation meant avoiding potential delays and roadblocks for the project’s development.

It also led to the disturbance of a site from which 3,000-year-old human remains had previously been removed — and where archaeologists and tribal members suspect more are buried.

and …

In a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Lummi Nation Chairman Tim Ballew says the tribe “has unconditional and unequivocal opposition” to the Gateway Pacific Terminal coal export pier that SSA Marine hopes to build at Cherry Point.

The letter is the 5,000-member tribe’s formal effort to exercise its treaty right power to block developments that pose a threat to tribal fisheries. In the past, the Army Corps has acknowledged that power and has refused to process permits for projects if tribal objections cannot be resolved.

Tribal officials announced Wednesday, July 31, that they would send such a letter. Earlier that same day, Muffy Walker, Army Corps of Engineers regulatory branch chief in Seattle, said her agency had not received formal notice of opposition from the tribe, and that the permitting process for Gateway Pacific would proceed until such notice arrived.

Tribal officials had already voiced strong opposition to Gateway Pacific at 2012 meetings held to gather public comment on what environmental issues should be studied as state, local and federal agencies decide whether to issue permits for the coal terminal.
In a letter to Col. Bruce Estok, the Corps’ district engineer in Seattle, Ballew said the tribe’s review of the project “resulted in a clear and convincing conclusion that the proposed projects, if built and operated, would have a substantial impairment on the Lummi treaty fishing right harvest at XweChiexen (Cherry Point).”

The letter also states: “The Lummi Nation cannot see how the proposed project could be developed in a manner that does not amount to significant impairment on the treaty fishing right and a negative effect on the Lummi way of life.”

The letter calls upon the Corps to carry out its legal responsibility to protect federally guaranteed tribal fishing rights, originally spelled out in the Point Elliott treaty of 1855 and later upheld in a series of federal court rulings beginning in 1974.

Racist High Schools, Mascots from Zionist and Non-Zionist Billionaires

Speaking of the Washington Professional Football team and our National Day of Mourning and that great Frank Baum!

According to Smithsonian historian Ives Goddard, early historical records indicate that “Redskin” was used as a self-identifier by Native Americans to differentiate between the two races. Goddard found that the first use of the word “redskin” came in 1769, in negotiations between the Piankashaws and Col. John Wilkins. Throughout the 1800s, the word was frequently used by Native Americans as they negotiated with the French and later the Americans. The phrase gained widespread usage among whites when James Fenimore Cooper used it in his 1823 novel The Pioneers. In the book, Cooper has a dying Indian character lament that “There will soon be no red-skin in the country.”

The Pioneers and other books by Cooper were largely seen as sympathetic towards Native Americans and their struggles in the 1800s. Decades later, the word redskin began to take on a negative, increasingly violent connotation. Author L. Frank Baum, best known for his classic The Wizard of Oz, celebrated the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee with a pair of editorials calling for the extermination of all remaining Native Americans. In one of the December 1890 pieces, Baum wrote “With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.”

Brother Can You Spare a Dime After the Genocide?

Now Amy “DN” Goodman gives us the special Thanksgiving (sic) rebroadcast of someone tied to the Baum story, and I wonder if she even knows the Oz’s racist appeal. Genocidal appeal as we see above. This is the new normal — Amy Goodman on one line of inquiry, but totally missing the boat on another. Baum is — was — will be a coward and bigot and pig in anyone’s book. Emphasis bold mine below.

Thanksgiving is around the corner, and families will be gathering to share a meal and, perhaps, enjoy another annual telecast of “The Wizard of Oz.” The 70-year-old film classic bears close watching this year, perhaps more than in any other, for the message woven into the lyrics, written during the Great Depression by Oscar-winning lyricist E.Y. “Yip” Harburg. There’s more to the Scarecrow and the Tin Man than meets the eye, and Harburg’s message has renewed resonance today in the midst of the greatest financial collapse since the Depression.

Harburg grew up in New York’s Lower East Side. In high school, he was seated alphabetically next to Ira Gershwin, and the two began a friendship that lasted a lifetime and helped shape 20th-century American song and culture. Ernie Harburg, Yip’s son and co-author of the biography “Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?,” told me, “Yip knew poverty deeply … it was the basis of Yip’s understanding of life as struggle.”

Harburg was deep in debt after the 1929 Wall Street crash. Gershwin suggested that Harburg write song lyrics. Before long, he wrote the song that captured the essence of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Ernie said of the music industry then: “They only wanted love songs or escape songs, so that in 1929 you had ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’ … There wasn’t one song that addressed the Depression, in which we were all living.”

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became a national hit and remains a kind of anthem for hard times, corporate greed and the dignity of working people:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

In the 1930s, Harburg became the lyricist for “The Wizard of Oz.” He also added the rainbow to the story, which doesn’t appear in L. Frank Baum’s original 1900 book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” This led Harburg to write the famous song “Over the Rainbow,” sung by the then-unknown Judy Garland.

While academic debate persists over whether Baum intended the story as a political allegory about the rise of industrial monopolists like John D. Rockefeller and the subsequent populist backlash, there is no doubt that Harburg’s influence made the 1939 film version more political.

The film, says Ernie Harburg, is about common people confronting and defeating seemingly insurmountable and violent oppression: The Scarecrow represented farmers, the Tin Man stood for the factory workers, and the Munchkins of the “Lollipop Guild” were the union members. Ernie recalled: “There was at least 30 percent unemployment at those times. And among blacks and minorities, it was 50, 60 percent. And there were bread lines, and the rich kept living their lifestyle.”

“The Wizard of Oz” was to be “MGM’s answer to [Disney’s] ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ ” Ernie recounts. It was initially a critical success, but a commercial flop. Yip Harburg went on to write “Finian’s Rainbow” for Broadway. It addresses racial bigotry, hatred of immigrants, easy credit and mortgage foreclosures. In 1947, “Finian’s Rainbow” was the first Broadway musical with an integrated cast. It was a hit, running for a year and a half. When Harburg’s unabashed political expression made him a target during the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted, and was banned from TV and film work from 1951 to 1962. Ironically, in the middle of his blacklist period, CBS broadcast “The Wizard of Oz” on television. It broke all viewership records, and has been airing since, gaining global renown and adulation.

This October, “Finian’s Rainbow” began its first full Broadway revival—the first since it was originally produced six decades ago—to rave reviews. Yip Harburg would be especially proud, no doubt, to know that one of the actors, Terri White, who plays a black sharecropper in “Finian’s Rainbow,” is back on Broadway despite having recently been homeless. From sleeping on park benches to starring on Broadway once again, this is just the kind of tale that inspired Harburg.

In response to his blacklisting, Harburg wrote a satiric poem, which reads in part:

Lives of great men all remind us
Greatness takes no easy way,
All the heroes of tomorrow
Are the heretics of today.
…
Why do great men all remind us
We can write our names on high
And departing leave behind us
Thumbprints in the FBI.

Let’s give thanks to Yip Harburg and all heretical artists, past and present, who have withstood censorship and banishment just for talking turkey.

The Wizard Calls for Genocide, Along the Yellow Brick Road!

Well, there you have that Amy Goodman spiel. Here, more prominent. I wonder if Goodman even knows!

He was a devoted family man, apparently a sensitive and kind individual, and he wrote books that were forerunners of today’s concerns with diversity. But in his newspaper he twice advocated genocide of Native Americans. He was L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, acclaimed world-wide as the Great American Fairy Tale.

From 1888 to 1891, nine years before he published the first of his fourteen Oz books, Baum lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He edited a newspaper during the terrible time of anti-Indian feeling leading up to the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee. He twice wrote editorials calling for the extermination of the entire Sioux Nation. Baum was not alone in his horrifying calls for genocide. Many historians believe that it was newspaper-induced hysteria that led to the massacre.

Baum’s books are a sharp contrast to this call of genocide. Difference is valued in his stories; he describes groups of creatures with different characteristics and beliefs who work out the logistics of living together in respect and harmony. Oz is a multicultural kingdom. How could someone with such a vision have called for the mass murder of an entire group of people?

The fabric of Oz is love, the emotional connection, life-form to life-form, that creates respect, recognition and acceptance. Baum didn’t practice that with the Lakota. Instead he abstracted these people, stripped away their humanness, and turned them into a concept, a “vanishing race”, thereby setting up the conditions to think them out of existence.

The gift that Baum gives us is the mirroring of ourselves. Genocide happens not only because of the action of evil people, but also because of the inaction of the good-hearted. Baum knee-jerked the “right,” acceptable, normal, main-stream reaction during the fabricated Indian scare of 1890, and was, thereby, one more agent of the genocide. Had he stood up to the government, had he questioned, as a good journalist should, the reports of “Indian uprisings,” and had he been joined by journalists around the state and country, the massacre might never have happened.

There were some who stood up, but because they were few, their voices were ignored, invalidated or silenced. General Nelson A. Miles, the Commander of the Army in the West, for example, tried three times (unsuccessfully) to court-martial the officer in charge at the time of the massacre. Any hopes he entertained for a bid at the Presidency were dashed by his stand for justice.

L. Frank Baum did not stand for justice at the time of Wounded Knee. He stood with the majority of whites: with government officials, with military authorities, with settlers, with other members of the press and with representatives of Christian churches. He stood publicly on the popular side, the side of injustice.

Today we also need to make a stand. We who live in Aberdeen, or in other parts of South Dakota, or outside the state, would like to attend a conference dedicated to better understanding L. Frank Baum and his time in South Dakota. We recognize, however, that before we can plan to celebrate the Aberdeen days of this man, we need to acknowledge his two calls for genocide.

Whereas:

L. Frank Baum edited a newspaper in Aberdeen from January 1890 to the spring of 1891, the time of the buildup toward the massacre at Wounded Knee and the massacre which followed the killing of Sitting Bull, and

Whereas:

Baum twice in editorials in his newspaper called for the total extermination of the Lakota people, and

Aberdeen is planning a festival to commemorate L. Frank Baum and his time in Aberdeen,

We take the following action:

We Apologize

We apologize to the Lakota people for the part that our community and nation played in the killing of their relatives.

We Apologize

[in as much that as] residents of Aberdeen, some of us are descendants of settlers who lived in Aberdeen at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre and who read L. Frank Baum’s editorials and made no protest against them as far as we know;
As residents of the state in which the massacre took place; as residents of a nation in which, according to Sen. Tom Daeschle (1993), the Congress apologized to the Sioux people for the 1890 Massacre in Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 153 of the 101st Congress.

We Pledge

…that as we celebrate the multicultural vision of L. Frank Baum’s fourteen Oz books, along with the rich outpouring of his creative genius in other works, we will also acknowledge and keep fresh in memory his calls for genocide. Further, we pledge that we will work to stop the continuing injustice toward Native Americans. We extend our hands in friendship to the Lakota/Nakota/Dakota nations and ask them to work with us to create, during the Aberdeen L. Frank Baum Conference and Festival, a Native American encampment in Aberdeen, re-creating the encampment of the Dakota band during Aberdeen’s July 4, 1890 celebration. We celebrate the traditions of friendship and cooperation between Indians and non-Indians which were developing in the period preceding the massacre and will do our best to further those traditions.

We would like to see justice today for the Lakota and other Native American people. In view of the Candy Rough Surface murder case in Mobridge which went unsolved for fifteen years, and the two unsolved murders of Native American women in Aberdeen, we need to shine the light on these issues of the 1990’s. Let us not slide back to the 1890’s when the slaughter of Native American men, women and children was accepted and, in the case of the Wounded Knee massacre, rewarded with medals of honor.

Paul Kirk has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He's been a part-time faculty since 1983, and as such has worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative high schools, language schools, as a private contractor-writing instructor for US military in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Washington. Read other articles by Paul.